Every month

Every month I'll post a new "taste" of Art Pepper's music as a FREE DOWNLOAD. These tastes are given away because they are "unreleasable" by virtue of the recording being cut off at beginning or end or by brief audio problems that occurred in the recording process.

THEY'RE TOO STUNNING TO HIDE AWAY IN MY FILES AS YOU'LL SOON SEE.

I'll also post occasional journal entries including updates on new releases.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Toooo busy. I need to have a life and friends: friends have been dying, getting sick, reminding me to live in the world while I'm here and not just live in work, and so.... Made the brilliant decision (sorry fans!) to postpone the release of the two disc set (Osaka, November 1980: George Cables, Tony Dumas, Carl Burnett) until end of October 2012.
I'm also working toward finishing the 3rd and nearly final draft of my memoir of my life with Art. I figured out where I'm at in the work and what's left to do and how long that ought to take. Based on how it's been going, I should be done by around September of this year, and then out to agents, etc.
A spectacular release of the vinyl single coming from Omnivore very soon, though. (I love it when other people do all the work. ) I'll keep you up to date.

Meanwhile, here's a snapshot from that 1980 Japanese tour. I took about 200 photos. Every one of Art shows him happy and smiling, just like this (Kyushu)

Monday, April 16, 2012

I'm unable to stop editing. I was making urgent changes in the galleys of Straight Life until the last minute. So this is a little different but not much different from the excerpt of the work-in-progress memoir that I read for the generous, gracious gang at Berklee on April 11th.

Photos: Working on Straight Life 40 years ago

[Background:

Forty years ago today, Art and I began our work on Straight
Life. This is an excerpt––from a
memoir I’ve been working on––which describes the beginning of that
process. We’d met in 1969 in
Synanon, a residential drug treatment program. Elaborate encounter sessions there were called “The Game.”
We fell in love. After 3 years,
Art left and went to live and work at a friend’s bakery. Soon, he wrote and asked me to join
him. I knew he wasn’t “cured” of
his addictions, and I was afraid to leave the safety of the institution, but I
justified my actions, thinking I would write a book about Art’s life.]

On April 11, 1972, I finally made Art commit
to an hour with me. That
afternoon, I went to his office/bedroom at the bakery with a notebook and one
of those, small, inexpensive tape recorders with a built-in mike. Art sat behind his immaculate old desk
with its too neat arrangement of pens and pencils, an adding machine, his
cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray, placed just so and constantly nudged into
ever more perfect alignment. And a
bottle of malt liquor.
"Mickey" was the brand he liked. A name to conjure with. I had no idea how much of this stuff he was drinking until
we began to record regularly.

I
said, "Tell me why you want to do
this book." Actually, up
to that point, it was all me, my desire to begin and his resistance. But he obediently took my cue. What follows, edited a little, is what
he said:

"Well, the reason I want to get the book
started… The book was going to be
written… When I was in San Quentin
someone came in to visit me. He
wanted to write a book on my life.
He got permission to see me.
He came in two or three times.
Then, when I got out, and I saw him in Hollywood, I decided I didn't
want the book written, because I didn't feel that that was the time to do
it. That was in '66. Now I want to have it done. Now I feel a real sense of urgency,
because I feel something pulling at me.
I have a strong feeling I'm not going to live too much longer, and
although I have lots of reasons to feel that way physically, this is more than
a physical thing. I can sense
it. It's becoming like another
person. I can almost touch
it. It's becoming real.

"I
can only liken it to one period when I was using heroin cut with procaine. I was shooting about a half an ounce of
this stuff a day, and I would hear voices, somebody calling my name, outside
the bathroom door, and little things would flash, I would see a flash to my
right or to my left, and I'd turn my head, and there was nothing there. It was an audible thing, a visual
thing; it wasn't an imagined thing.
It actually happened, and it was induced by the procaine the heroin was
cut with. And now I feel a
presence. Just in the last couple
of weeks I've really been feeling it.
I can feel this presence and the presence is death."

I
gasped. I checked the tape. It was rolling. He continued, going far afield, into a
wild improvisation on aging, death, superstition, suicide in comic book
imagery, Edgar Cayce, and immortality.

That
was it. He was done. He was very low, but I was on
fire. I couldn't let him stop
talking. I asked him, there, surrounded by awards he'd been given and his album
covers, all of which he'd mounted on his walls, if he believed he was a
genius. I'd heard him on this
theme before.

What
he said, then, about his bandstand battle with Sonny Stitt, appears in Straight
Life. I edited it and made it the
Conclusion, his summing up, and it's been excerpted and praised in almost every
review. For me it was Art's opening
salvo, brilliant, touching, rhythmic, evocative, suspenseful, triumphant. When he finished with that, we both gasped. I hear us on the tape. Then we laughed. I was sitting on his little bed and
hollered, "Wow!" rocking
back and hitting my head on the wall.
Thunk! "Holy shit!"

"Turn
it off, turn it off!" Art
told me. I turned the tape
recorder off. Then,
surreptitiously, I turned it on again.

We
were both talking at once: His
narrative had been like a jazz solo, its repeating theme, its mounting
vehemence, its forward movement.
And yet it had been history.
A document. This may have
been the first time Art was made aware of just how great his storytelling gifts
were. As for me, I was confirmed
in my belief that there could be a book
and knew that there must be.

And
Art, well, he went on delightedly, saying that he was going to fall in love
with the tape recorder, that he was going to start dreaming about it. He said he saw, now, that his life was
beautiful because it made sense, now, as
"a recollection." And
that his fate had prepared him for this, his final work, by throwing him into
Synanon where playing the Game enhanced his verbal skills and where he met me,
who was making all this possible.

Though
Art was to lose this early enthusiasm, making it harder and harder for me to
sit him down and get and keep him talking, I had finally found my calling. I’d been prepared by my intense
childhood exposure to music, my helter-skelter Berkeley education in
anthropology, folklore/oral history, and literature, and by the sly tales of
his youthful hobo adventures told me by my drunkard stepfather (a great
raconteur in his cups). I'd
absorbed no literary or academic rules I'd have to exert myself to follow or
break. I had no political axes to grind,
no philosophical points to make.
I confess a lack of
interest in the great world, its battles and governments. I can't comprehend it. I have enough trouble understanding my
own immediate world, glimpsed in its chores and quarrels, love, money, work,
responsibilities, beauties, delusions, passions and obsessions, illness and
death. And the world was teaching me that generalizing,
judging, and prescribing in terms of class or race or sex is pointless (and presumptious) in
terms of human beings, mysteries, all.

I’d
written all my life: Stories,
poetry, lyrical, pretty stuff.
Lazy stuff, in that I was easily satisfied with tricky images and deft
sentence endings. Art’s language,
his directness, shocked and stirred me, steered me toward true seriousness, for
the first time in my life, toward true ambition. I once heard a musician Art jammed with say “He made me play way over my head.” Art’s intensity inspired and dared
everyone he worked with to get serious.

As
I worked with him, I learned to describe things over and over to myself on
paper trying to dig out of the descriptions a kind of witness's statement. Memory is subjective, selective, but,
as archeologists work daintily, unflaggingly, with brushes on some tiny patch
of interest, in my relentless scratchings, I'd find stuff that surprised me,
that might not exactly jibe, that gave a new perspective. And so, in turn, I goaded Art.

In the years to come, I made him repeat some of his problematic anecdotes again and again. I wanted to know everything. When I demanded elaborate descriptions of people and places, he came up with often stunning, masterful vignettes. As for his criminal or suicidal mad behavior: What came before? What was the provocation? How did he feel about it at the time? How did he feel now, looking back? I wasn't looking for justifications for his actions, but I wanted the descriptions to be as full as he could make them. I'd edit all the many versions, coming up with what we both thought gave the most complete account. I was single-mindedly oblivious of how cruelly deep I made him dig and of the pressure he put on himselfto tell the story well. My cross-examinations and contradictions could make him angry and defensive. But Art loved honesty (he called it “Truth"), and he respected me; he trusted me and knew I valued him despite what damning stuff we might dig up.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

More from that incredible Parnell's date in 1980. Landscape, incomplete but just too wonderful to hide away. Milcho Leviev, David Williams, Carl Burnett.

Look BELOW the invitation for the music

An invitation: At 6 p.m. on April 11th (the 40th anniversary of the day Art and I began our work on Straight Life) I'll be at the Berklee School in Boston to have a public conversation with da DAH! MICHAEL CONNELLY author of the Harry Bosch series (I've voraciously read every one of them and hunger for more). Michael's a jazz fan with the exceptionally good taste to love Art Pepper, Frank Morgan and other great musicians. And he writes soulfully about them. I'll read a little from my memoir-in-progress and Michael will read from whatever he wants, and we'll talk about writing and jazz. There will be cocktails and a band performance. Dancing optional. (I think I'm kidding. Maybe not) Call 617-747-2514. (I think it's free.)

You are invited. (the music player with your taste of April is below the lovely invitation)